The $130 Samsung 850 EVO 500GB is a great SSD going for one of its lowest prices ever

Our friends at Thrifter are back again, and it's time to upgrade your PC's SSD!

The Samsung 850 EVO 500GB SSD is down to $129.99 on Newegg with code EMCRJCF22. Without the deal it's down to $140, which is a price Amazon has recently matched. For the last few weeks, this SSD has sold at $150, which was already a step down in price. This drop to $130 is the best price we've seen in a long time.

The 250GB version of this SSD is back down to $90, which is a great low price for a lower capacity.

This is the perfect upgrade for a PC still running its operating system on a slower hard drive (are there any of you left?), or anyone using an older SSD that could do with a speed boost.

The 850 EVO is well-reviewed with a lot of positive results. Windows Central called it the Best Overall SSD for Windows PCs. CNET gave it 4.5 stars. The Wirecutter still considers it to be the best SSD for its balance of performance and price. AnandTech has one of the most thorough reviews of this SSD on the Internet and called it "yet another showcase of Samsung's engineering talent."

At this price, the 850 EVO is cheaper than even the more modern competition, like Crucial's MX300 SSD. It's not just cheap, it's also fast with read/write performance up to 540 MB/s and 520 MB/s, respectivelly.

Because Samsung designs SSDs with home-grown engineering, it's also built for the long-term with twice the endurance of the competition. It's capable of handling much heavier workloads, and Samsung backs all that up with a five-year warranty.

If you need help installing a new SSD, Windows Central has some tips for that.

If you don't have a 2.5-inch drive bay on your desktop, you might need a 3.5-inch mounting bracket like this to fit it firmly where it belongs. You could also get this $9 Anker enclosure case if you need a more portable drive or need USB access to the drive for any reason.

Put 3 of these in RAID5 and you have a full 1TB system with total fail-over protection and you even get a slight speed gain on reading over a single drive, all for less than a RAID1 config.

Somewhere, somebody got in their head that RAID5 and SSD don't work together and that's been a common Internet theme, but it's wrong. As long as you have 3+ ports available, it's the most cost effective way to get data protection and speed at the same time.